This free newsletter is designed to aid the student and the instructor of unified structured inventive
thinking as it is taught in the USIT textbook. Topics in the newsletter are selected at random and are
not organized, but may continue through several issues. Discussions, suggestions, and Q&A are invited.

The main part of the newsletter is a mini-lecture. These may pose, and/or demonstrate, problems that
challenge one’s creative imagination. They may also present very simple inventions to be addressed in
order to direct the reader’s attention to the goals of USIT; namely, to aid the discovery of new
perspectives of a problem from which solution concepts may be found.

The mini-lectures are translated into Spanish, Japanese, and Korean. Readers may be found in more than
40 countries.

Free back issues of the newsletters are available in bundles of 10 issues. Click on REGISTRATION where
you will find selections of free publications you are invited to read. You are simply requested to
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and are not distributed in any way.

Example:
An excerpt from NewsLetter_40.

1. Conclusion of “How to Invent a Better Drinking Vessel”
Many heuristics have been published over the years for use in inventing. Of course, the most popular,
and most used, is brainstorming. For speed, brainstorming is hard to beat. It gets things done quickly.
But it is more like flushing the mind of the obvious. Too often this is where problem solving ends for
many technologists. Yet this is where one should now turn to structured-problem solving; it’s the ideal
place to begin USIT.

One heuristic of USIT has been demonstrated in the foregoing mini-lectures on inventing a new drinking
vessel. I refer to this type of problem as invention based on a prototype. It is a common situation that
industrial problem solvers often face when their company decides that it is time to reinvent a product.
As demonstrated, the key to this heuristic is to tie attributes into new functions without immediate
concern for objects – a fresh perspective.

Heuristics are the heart of problem solving methodologies. Heuristics used by engineers and scientists
in solving design-type problems are the non-algorithmic, empirical tricks, tools, and techniques learned
academically and from experience. They do not solve problems. Instead they give pause to look at problems
in different ways for new insights.